New Haven schools join drive to diversify

Desegregation. For most people, the word brings to mind vicious court battles, marches, and parents rioting against forced busing. Rare is the person who associates desegregation with voluntary redistricting, educational regionalism, and intra-distric t magnet schools. In New Haven, the latter is the surprising reality as the battle over the meaning of equal education moves into the 21st century.

The history of segregation in New Haven, as in many other northern cities, is one of quiet and unprovable discrimination. White flight and urban decay are two regular occurrences in these cities. White flight is supposedly triggered by declining prope rty values, an occurrence which, incredibly enough, always seems to follow on the heels of a minority influx.

The Annex, the easternmost region of New Haven, has been caught up in a movement to secede ever since the city introduced a scattered public-housing program. White flight and urban decay have created an overwhelmingly minority school population-83 per cent in a recent state survey. The hyper-segregation which has emerged in New Haven's schools over the past 20 years is a visible reminder of the failure of the North to match the forced desegregation of the South and Midwest.

Sheff sparks segregation fears

This state of affairs began to change in 1989 when the parents of Milo Sheff, a student in the Hartford school system, accused the state of failing to provide equal education. The charge, which centered on the charge that an all-minority school distri ct does not ponder an environment of equal education any more than an all-white school district does, was laid out in Sheff v. O'Neill, a case which raised significant questions for Connecticut and the nation.

The Sheff case lit a fire under what had been, for many, a cold issue. Desegregation and forced busing had dropped out of the headlines long ago, and the people of the state, especially anxious parents, wondered how the state would respond.

In fact, desegregation had been an issue among educators for years. In fact, the Connecticut Department of Education had proposed that the state look into voluntary desegregation in 1987 and 1988, before Sheff even came to trial.

Two Connecticuts: separate, not equal

"It had been discussed before," Gerald Tirozzi, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the federal Department of Education, said. Tirozzi studied desegregation as the former superintendent of New Haven schools and the commissione r of education in Connecticut. "We had studies done and the information we got back was pretty clear. Eighteen of 162 school districts contain 82 percent of the state's minority students and 80 percent of those were in the cities. That's where the phrase 'Two Connecticuts, Separate and Unequal,' came from," he said.

Two Connecticuts, one poor and urban, the other wealthy and suburban, were the focus of the Sheff case. How much is the state responsible for bringing those two worlds together?

The Sheff case made this an important question for legislators. In an attempt to head off a possible court mandate, Governor Lowell Weicker, TD '52, called on the state to enact a voluntary desegregation law. In June 1993, a mandate was approved. The mandate broke the state into 11 regions, each of which was required to present a tentative desegregation program to the state by Dec. 1, 1994. The state law did not require concrete proposals nor did it specify penalties for regions that failed to comply. Funding for magnet schools and other

(See New Haven schools)